176 IN BRIGHTEST AFRICA 
that I was mounting. Many people who saw these 
clay models would suggest that I have them cast in 
bronze. If I had not still had the fever of sculpturing 
in my blood, these remarks would not have stuck in 
my mind, but as it was they did. So this idea be- 
came familiar to me. 
However, it was a good many years after it first 
became a regular inhabitant of my mind that I put 
it in practice, for along with it had grown up the no- 
tion that I should not merely turn models into bronzes 
but that I would wait until I had a real contribution. 
Real contributions did not seem abundant and so year 
after year went by with no bronzes made. 
Then in 1912 a situation arose which I thought 
forced sculpture upon me. I had a dream of a great 
African Hall of forty groups of animals with all the 
ingenuity, all the technique, and all the art the 
country could boast of. By that time I had come to 
feel that taxidermy could be a great art. I felt that 
a beautifully modelled animal required at least as 
much knowledge, taste, skill, and technique as a 
bronze or storie animal. But I knew that this con- 
ception was not common. A taxidermist couldn’t 
talk art. Especially he couldn’t talk art convincingly 
to the kind of men who supported great museum 
ventures. It was a recognized thing to support art. 
Taxidermy had no such tradition. The only way out 
of the dilemma that I could see was to prove that 
whether or not taxidermy was an art at least a taxi- 
dermist could be an artist. 
It was my desire to make an appeal to those men 
